"Dr. Ellen Littman, author of Understanding Girls with ADHD, has studied high IQ adults and adolescents with the disorder for more than 25 years. She attributes the under-diagnosis of girls and women—it is estimated that there are around 4 million who are not diagnosed, or half to three-quarters of all women with ADHD—and the misunderstandings that have ensued about the disorder as it manifests in females, to the early clinical studies of ADHD in the 1970s. “These studies were based on really hyperactive young white boys who were taken to clinics,” Littman says...
while a decrease in symptoms at puberty is common for boys, the opposite is true for girls, whose symptoms intensify as estrogen increases in their system, thus complicating the general perception that ADHD is resolved by puberty...
For the two decades prior to my diagnosis, I never would have suspected my symptoms were symptoms; rather, I considered these traits—my messiness, forgetfulness, trouble concentrating, important-document-losing—to be embarrassing personal failings."
There's so much wrapped up in here - how diseases and disorders can be defined around a reference group, how a diagnosis of a disorder can relieve a lot of shame, and then the interesting neurodevelopmental questions about ADHD.
(credit to MD)
Some other articles on this topic -
Something to listen to (including an ~online quiz~):
“In conversations or meetings, I would constantly pre-empt people – anticipating their train of thought and talking over them (with varying degrees of success). I found myself interrupting, jumping in, and being boisterous in cutting to the proverbial chase. There was no chase, except me chasing time…
I used to think I was anxious. But I realised that the content of the thoughts were not worrisome – there were just lots of thoughts. All of the time. From the moment my synapses starting firing to when I finally fell asleep. If my thoughts were milk, they could make butter…
It's seem de rigueur to joke about being 'totally addicted' to technology/devices that you enjoy using or 'soooo ADD' when you just mean busy and excitable. I made these comments and mostly people joked along – until one person didn't. He was a colleague and child psychiatrist who gently suggested I was doing a pretty good job at disguising the issues with my coping techniques, but the cracks were starting to show. He was right. The strategies themselves were becoming the distraction.”
"From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting... findings suggest that people with A.D.H.D are walking around with reward circuits that are less sensitive at baseline than those of the rest of us. Having a sluggish reward circuit makes normally interesting activities seem dull and would explain, in part, why people with A.D.H.D. find repetitive and routine tasks unrewarding and even painfully boring."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/a-natural-fix-for-adhd.html
Not being in a learning environment is a huge shift for me, I never realized how many little thrills I was used to getting in my daily life from something new and interesting I would encounter as a student. And maybe this is why I always started to feel irritable in August and look forward to school starting again. And I have always been a person who becomes less productive on a task the longer she does it and the easier it becomes.
"researchers are testing mindfulness: teaching people to monitor their thoughts and feelings without judgments or other reactivity. Rather than simply being carried away from a chosen focus, they notice that their attention has wandered, and renew their concentration.
According to a recent report in Clinical Neurophysiology, adults with A.D.D. were shown to benefit from mindfulness training combined with cognitive therapy; their improvements in mental performance were comparable to those achieved by subjects taking medications."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/exercising-the-mind-to-treat-attention-deficits/?_r=0
From a neuro perspective, it’s a really interesting question we are probably like 15 years away from really having the tools to directly address, because it’s a prefrontal cortex thing that’s not cellular like, say, Alzheimer’s but instead it’s a difference in the system-state of the brain. And it could probably be cellular stuff too.
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